YouTube expands captioning

YouTube announced that it is expanding support for its automatic captioning service for six European languages. The company said that its service will now display captions in German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Russian and Dutch. That brings the total number of languages up to 10: YouTube already generates automatic captions for English, Japanese, Korean and Spanish.

As with the current languages, viewers will be able to see the captions by clicking the “CC” button in the lower right-hand corner of eligible videos. The company provides the auto-captions as a baseline transcript of what’s going in its videos. However, since speech recognition technology isn’t perfect, it also provides editing tools to improve the quality of the captions on its site.